A marketplace platform is more than a storefront. Scope the customer experience, merchant operations, payments, delivery, support, data, and extension model together so a polished launch does not hide an incomplete operating system.
1. Customer ordering surfaces
Define the responsive web experience and any customer apps, kiosk, call-center, or embedded ordering surfaces you actually need. Record branding, domain, catalog discovery, cart, checkout, account, accessibility, localization, notifications, and support requirements for each surface.
2. Merchant and catalog operations
- Merchant onboarding, verification, roles, stores, hours, service areas, and status changes.
- Catalogs, categories, items, modifiers, pricing, taxes, availability, inventory, and scheduled changes.
- Order acceptance, preparation, cancellation, refund, substitution, dispute, and support workflows.
- Network-wide rules and store-level overrides with an audit trail.
3. Payments and marketplace economics
Document who charges the customer, how funds are routed, which party sets commissions or fees, how merchants and drivers are paid, and who owns refunds, disputes, tax, invoicing, and reconciliation. Treat payment-provider onboarding, identity checks, territories, settlement timing, and reserves as scoped dependencies.
4. Delivery and fulfillment
- Pickup, scheduled orders, in-house fleets, and third-party delivery are separate operating models.
- Define dispatch rules, driver assignment, batching, zones, capacity, tracking, handoffs, proof of delivery, tips, and failed delivery.
- Record which provider owns each state and what happens when a dependency is unavailable.
5. Marketing, loyalty, and customer data
Scope consent, customer profiles, order history, offers, rewards, wallet credit, referrals, messaging channels, analytics, retention, deletion, and export. Access and control depend on contracts, configuration, consent, and privacy law; a branded interface alone does not establish ownership of every underlying system or dataset.
6. Business management and support
Define dashboards, reporting, merchant support, customer support, driver support, incident response, permissions, audit logs, reconciliation, billing, and operational exports. Name the team responsible for each workflow and the evidence needed to close an incident.
7. Integration and extension boundaries
List required POS, payment, delivery, CRM, analytics, identity, tax, and accounting connections. For every integration, record supported objects and directions, authentication, rate limits, webhooks, retries, observability, ownership, versioning, and an exit path. Describe custom APIs or frontend work only after confirming the selected plan and license.
Use cases to test against the same architecture
- A multi-restaurant marketplace with merchant onboarding, scheduled delivery, promotions, and settlement.
- A local-commerce marketplace that combines different store types under one discovery and checkout experience.
- A grocery network with substitutions, weighted items, delivery windows, and store-level inventory.
- A delivery network that accepts jobs from businesses and coordinates couriers across service areas.
- A business-to-business marketplace with account pricing, approval, bulk ordering, invoices, and repeat purchasing.
- A multi-location enterprise that needs corporate rules, store overrides, integrations, and consolidated reporting.
Choose evidence before promises
For each requirement, mark it as available, configurable, custom work, third-party dependency, or not confirmed. Attach the product source, owner, acceptance test, plan or contract dependency, and date reviewed. Do not turn a target outcome, mockup, customer logo, or historical metric into a current capability claim.
Keep current plan details, applicable charges, inclusions, exclusions, activation work, and commercial terms on the pricing page and in the applicable agreement.
Launch gate
A marketplace is ready for local launch when its selected use case has a verified customer journey, merchant workflow, money movement, fulfillment path, support model, data boundary, integration tests, failure handling, and named owners. Scope and evidence—not a universal feature count or launch-time promise—should decide readiness.